"There's been a bit of a misunderstanding," pianist Django Bates brightly announced. "We thought we were guests of Evan's, and he thought he was a guest of ours." Contemporary-sax trailblazer Evan Parker had been invited to curate a five-night Vortex season for musicians he likes (from Oxford keyboard firebrand Alexander Hawkins to the tireless octogenerarian Stan Tracey) but a liaison with Bates's remarkable Beloved Bird trio was bound to be one of the most tempting prospects of the run.

Bates's trio with bass-and-drums partnership Petter Eldh and Peter Bruun delivered one of the great jazz albums of 2010 with its Charlie Parker interpretations on Beloved Bird. The "misunderstanding" was down to Parker's modest conviction that the crowd ought to hear those visionary rearrangements unimpeded. In the event, they made a compellingly varied show together. Tentative opening moments quickly turned to a maelstrom, with Parker's tenor sax delivering gruff eddies of sound and exclamations over Bates's runs and the agile pulse of Eldh and Bruun. The alertness with which the two jazz stars adapted their phrasing to each other was astonishing, and extended to abstract reinvention of the jazz ballad, too.

In the second set, the saxophonist sat at the side of the stage for a while, smiling at the tempo juggles, headlong bebop and hard-packed theme statements of Charlie Parker's Scrapple from the Apple and Moose the Mooche, some of the most inventive reappraisals of his work ever conceived. Parker resisted Bates's invitation to join a jaunt through Hot House, but when Bates swapped piano for tenor horn, the two set off on an exuberant dialogue that was nearly straightahead swing.

• This article was amended on 1 February 2011. The original said that Bates swapped piano for English horn. This has been corrected.